May 11, 2013

Basically, nobody outside California knows anything about the history of illegal immigration, so anything the Heritage Foundation says about the likely costs of another amnesty is automatically "controversial." But, in California ... From the Los Angeles Times:

With an estimated 1.1 million people in L.A. County illegally, officials fear that the county will get stuck with many costs for those who apply for citizenship.

By Richard Simon, Los Angeles Times

May 11, 2013, 5:05 p.m.

WASHINGTON — Few regions will absorb the impact of future immigration reforms more than Los Angeles County, home to an estimated 1.1 million people in the country illegally, one-tenth of the nation's total.

As the Senate Judiciary Committee began debating the bipartisan immigration bill last week, county officials voiced concerns that local taxpayers will be "left holding the bag" to pay for the brunt of healthcare and other services for multitudes of immigrants who apply for citizenship.

Local and state officials believe the overhaul bill will encourage those in the country illegally to come out of the shadows and turn to local services during the proposed 13-year-long pathway to citizenship.

"The one thing that's really clear as day is that the federal government is going to be protecting itself against costs, and we're going to be left holding the bag," said Mark Tajima, an analyst with the county's chief administrative office.

In Washington last week for the start of the debate, county officials, including Supervisors Don Knabe and Zev Yaroslavsky, warned of a "major cost shift'' to state and local governments from the proposed legislation and pressed Congress to provide federal aid to help cover future costs.

Officials could not, however, provide a figure on the potential tab. Instead, as they made the rounds on Capitol Hill, they pointed to the $800 million the county received in the last big immigration overhaul signed by President Reagan in 1986.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), after meeting with county officials, brought up the county's concerns at the Judiciary Committee meeting and directed her staff to look into the possibility of creating a "state impact assistance" fund, similar to the $4 billion provided to local and state governments in the 1986 bill. ...

A memo to the Board of Supervisors from a top county government affairs officer said some of the provisions of the bills "would be especially unfair because newly legalized individuals would be paying taxes, fines and fees to the federal government, but state and local governments, such as the county, would have to bear most of the cost of services provided to them."

Although the county provides emergency care to all, regardless of legal status, county officials say the legislation could significantly increase its costs for non-emergency care. They point to an estimate that up to 446,000 of such immigrants in the county have no health insurance.

Los Angeles County spends roughly $600 million a year on healthcare for immigrants in the country illegally, officials said.

States are also concerned about how they will pay for services, including English proficiency classes sought by applicants for legal status at a time when funding for such adult school programs has been cut. Community colleges and other institutions will be flooded with demand.

"For states like California and New York, there is the potential of a lot of people coming to the state and local government for assistance," said Sheri Steisel, senior federal affairs counsel for the National Conference of State Legislatures. "Just because the federal government has decided not to provide access to federal benefit programs does not mean that the need goes away."

County officials want Congress to create a fund similar to the $4-billion allocation in 1986 or make applicants for legal status eligible for federal benefits sooner. Some 720,000 of the 2.7 million immigrants granted amnesty nationwide as a result of the 1986 overhaul lived in Los Angeles County.

Interesting number: over a quarter of the unexpectedly large total of illegal aliens amnestied last time were in Los Angeles County. In turn, L.A. County turned out to be the central engine of the 2000s Housing Bubble and Bust, both in Los Angeles County, but, even worse, in areas where people are spun off too from L.A., such as the Inland Empire, Las Vegas, and Phoenix.

What's next? After that bravura display of media marketing muscle that was the gay marriage whoop-tee-doo, what's the encore? There has to be something else to force the rubes to identify themselves by their lack of enthusiasm for the latest cause / crisis. But ... what?

Fallon Fox is the first openly transgender athlete in mixed martial arts and the most prominent in a professional sport in decades.

Fallon Fox, born Boyd Burton, found herself in the spotlight after coming out as a transgender fighter in mixed martial arts.

More Photos

Thanks but no thanks on the "More Photos" offer.

I'm struck by the quote "first openly transgender athlete ..." Is the New York Times implying that other women athletes used to be dudes, but we're not supposed to know about it?

By the way, that much publicized 6'8" center on the Baylor women's basketball team who can dunk, is the WNBA's #1 draft choice, and who recently announced was playing for the other (?) team ...

Keegan-Michael Key butches it up

Here's a Sports Illustrated interview with Brittney Griner, and it's like a Saturday Night Live skit during the seasons when Lorne Michaels is too cheap to spring for a black woman cast member. Brittney Griner is like Tracy Morgan in a dress speaking in falsetto, except that Griner wears a bowtie and speaks in a baritone.

A few skeptics have pointed out that Brittney Griner skipped the Olympics last summer despite being the most dominant player in the world of women's basketball, and the Olympics being the chief showcase for women's basketball. Some have commended the Baylor brain trust for not exposing Griner to the Olympic spotlight that greeted Caster Semenya, a South African youth who is built like an LSU cornerback, who won the silver medal in the women's 800m at the London Games.

The Olympics introduced sex testing in the 1960s because the Nazis, the Soviets, and the North Koreans kept entering men in women's events, but stopped making it regular after the Cold War. But, the Olympics reserve the right to demand sex testing in egregious cases, like Semenya's.

Lots of real women runners complained about Semenya participating on the women's side of the Olympics, but Semenya's ex-East German coach and other managers artfully played the race card. How dare Europeans question a South African person of color? It's just like apartheid! It's sexism and racism rolled into one: sraxcism!

Granted, you may argue that the number of hermaphrodites and transsexuals are too tiny to matter, and that allowing people who are mostly men to beat women (sometimes literally, as in this MMA case) is not in the interest of women. But that's not the point, the point is that there needs to be a new post-gay marriage cause, and a lot is beginning to be invested in R&D to determine which it will be. This is the second article the NYT has highlighted recently on this esoteric issue, so it definitely has a chance.

A commenter points out that an MMA fighter, retired NFL player Matt Mitrione, has already gotten in career trouble for saying out loud that mutilated ex-men shouldn't beat up women for money. From Wikipedia:

On April 8, 2013 it was announced that Mitrione had his contract suspended by the UFC after making transphobic comments about trangendered fighter Fallon Fox during an interview on The MMA Hour," Mitrione called Fox a "lying, sick, sociopathic, disgusting freak," who he hopes never fights again.[19]

The UFC made a statement on Mitrione's comments that read. "The organization finds Mr. Mitrione’s comments offensive and wholly unacceptable and – as a direct result of this significant breach of the UFC’s code of conduct – Mr. Mitrione's UFC contract has been suspended and the incident is being investigated. The UFC is a friend and ally of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community, and expects and requires all 450 of its athletes to treat others with dignity and respect."[20] The suspension was lifted after two weeks when Mitrione's next fight against Brendan Schaub was announced.[18]

Now, you might think of Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, as kind of a money-grubbing vulgarian who is looking to make money off of violent freak shows. But, now we know that, in complete contrast to that horrible mouth-breathing Matt Mitrione, Dana's actually a friend and ally of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community in the struggle against transphobic comments.

LAS VEGAS – UFC heavyweight Matt Mitrione (6-2 MMA, 6-2 UFC) has thus far remained silent in regards to his recent suspension for breaching the UFC's code of conduct. But with the promotion's inquiry into the incident complete, Mitrione wants the world to know he's sorry for the remarks.

"I want to apologize for my hurtful comments about Fallon Fox and a group within our society which, in truth, I know nothing about," Mitrione told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com). "I know now there’s an important line between expressing an opinion on a subject and being hurtful and insensitive. I crossed that line by expressing my views in an ugly, rude and inappropriate manner."

The UFC froze Mitrione's contract earlier this month for offensive remarks he made about transgender fighter Fallon Fox. He also was fined an undisclosed amount and, according to UFC President Dana White, complained about the hit to his pocketbook.

In the midst of a rant about Fox's career as a professional MMA fighter, Mitrione called the 37-year-old a "lying, sociopathic freak."

"Earlier this month, heavyweight competitor Matt Mitrione made offensive and hurtful remarks about an individual from the transgender community during an appearance on the 'MMA Hour' broadcast," UFC Executive Vice President and COO Lawrence Epstein explained. "The UFC immediately suspended Mr. Mitrione from all duties relating to his position as a UFC athlete, pending the results of an investigation.

"As communicated to Mr. Mitrione in the form of a written reprimand, that investigation found he went beyond expressing an honestly held belief and that his comments represented a significant breach of the UFC's code of conduct. As a result, Mr. Mitrione received a significant monetary penalty."

UFC officials declined to reveal the amount of Mitrione's fine. However, multiple sources close to the situation repeatedly addressed the value as "significant." Mitrione's pay for his recent UFC on FUEL TV 9 win was not disclosed. This past December, he was paid $12,000 for a loss to Roy Nelson. He would have earned another $12,000 with a win.

$12,000 per fight for an ex-NFL player who fights every few months? No wonder Wikipedia says Dana White's net worth is $150 million.

Many MMA pundits have taken issue with Mitrione's short suspension, which lasted just 16 days before he was recently booked for a summer fight with Brendan Schaub.

Who knew that MMA pundits were paid up members of the Volunteer Auxiliary Thought Police?

"Mr. Mitrione has expressed genuine contrition for the harm he caused," Epstein said. "Matt is not a hateful person, and we are confident in his sincerity to make amends."

UFC officials said they are currently in contact with the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) to help Mitrione determine how best to work toward repairing his relationship with the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. In the meantime, Mitrione said he regrets his choice of words and will ensure that he never again makes the same mistake.

"I know there are people who look up to UFC athletes, and I let them and myself down by setting a very poor example," Mitrione said. "I also want to apologize to Lorenzo Fertitta, Dana White and everyone associated with the UFC.

Ernest Hemingway

You might almost imagine that Dana White is pretty good at manipulating people using powerful 21st Century tropes for his own profit, and that White suspending some meathead jock for objecting to a man who beats up women for money is a good way for Dana White to get even richer. But that couldn't be because Dana White is rich and can pay for expert PR help, in contrast to that awful Matt Mitrione, whom White employs for a few thousand dollars per month. (It could even be that this whole "controversy" was pre-scripted by UFC writers the way WWE feuds are scripted. If so, it worked like a charm, getting serious coverage in the New York Times.)

If F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were alive today, Fitzgerald would say, "The rich are different," and Hemingway would have answered back, "You are absolutely right, Scott. For example, the rich withhold pay from their employees for making transphobic comments. That's how we know the rich are better."

LAWRENCE, Kan. — The visitor to Haskell Indian Nations University detailed his roaring 20s: drug addict, garbage collector, suicidal burnout once told by a doctor that he was mentally retarded. It was a curious way to inspire a group of young American Indian students long surrounded by these types of problems. Until he got to the good part.

“I never shared this with anyone until I got my Ph.D.,” he said.

His American name is David A. Patterson, his Cherokee name Adelv unegv Waya, or Silver Wolf. He is a tenure-track assistant professor at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. His groundbreaking research on the pitfalls facing Native Americans is both informed and inspired by his own story of deliverance.

“Mentally retarded? I wish I could find that doctor now,” Dr. Patterson said, the students transfixed.

Dr. Patterson, 49, has devoted what he considers his second life to studying the quicksand that just about swallowed him, and that continues to imperil American Indians more than any other ethnic group. About 18 percent of American Indian or Alaska Native adults need substance-abuse treatment, almost twice the national average, according to figures from the federal government. Deaths from alcoholism, diabetes, homicide and suicide are two to six times as high among Native Americans as they are among other groups, according to various studies.

Student and Dr. Patterson

During Dr. Patterson’s childhood in Louisville, Ky., any interest he might have had in his Cherokee roots was discouraged by his abusive father and squelched by teasing schoolmates. By 9, he had moved from beer to highballs, and at 18 he was a quaalude-favoring high school dropout. Detached and directionless, he pointed a loaded rifle at his head one afternoon in his basement before someone knocked at the door.

It was his mother’s brother, Bill Allen. He treated David’s disconnection with some long-repressed family history. Mr. Allen recounted how his grandmother, David’s great-grandmother, was half-Cherokee, making David 1/16th Cherokee.

1/16th Cherokee!

He told him where she came from, the traditions David never enjoyed. This expanding family lineage, which to that point had essentially stopped with his Irish father, gave David a new sense of belonging. ...

Dr. Patterson used this newfound past to conceive a future. ... Growing his hair into a Cherokee ponytail and with fresh tattoos of a wolf and three tepees, he enrolled at Spalding University and earned a degree in social work.

He got his master’s degree and his doctorate from the University of Louisville, also in social work. He was hired by the University of Buffalo as an assistant professor studying solutions for Native American substance abuse and high dropout rates — longtime problems caused in part, Dr. Patterson’s research suggests, by the same cultural disconnection that he had felt.

As you know, no redhead in the history of Scotland, Northern Ireland, Ireland, England, or Wales has ever battled alcoholism.

Actually, the reddish-haired peoples have a variety of traditions of semi-successful social movements to overcome alcoholism, going back to Hogarth's 1750s paintings of Gin Alley v. Beer Lane, the Irish Catholic temperance movement of the mid 1800s, Bill Wilson and Bob Smith's Alcoholics Anonymous, up through Ian MacKaye and Jeff Nelson's punk band Minor Threat, which launched the Straight Edge movement.

There have been similar movements among American Indians, going back to Tecumseh's brother The Prophet's demand that Indians give up firewater. But, the general lack of success among American Indians at battling demon rum is of course what makes it so much more profitable these days to be a professional American Indian helping more real American Indians to get in touch with their traditions, even though their traditions are largely ones of failure in dealing with the evolutionarily novel chemical.

In the long run, biochemical advances are the most likely way to deal with the fact that Native Americans haven't had as along to evolve to deal with the effects of alcohol, the way, say, Mediterranean peoples have. But there doesn't seem much interesting in studying that approach these days, since we all know race doesn't exist.

The Brown School, ranked by U.S. News and World Report as one of the nation’s top schools of social work, lured him away last year.

Squinting like Clint playing a halfbreed

“He brings to the table new strategies, new ways and new perspectives to think about,” said Pete Coser, the program manager for the Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies, a division of the Brown School. “His story and experiences will be able to bring, at least, a light to those that are experiencing it now. Things that plague Indian country. How do we get over the mental monster that keeps us in that box?” ...

Dr. Patterson’s research focuses on intervention strategies for substance abusers in underserved populations, particularly American Indians. He has just finished teaching a graduate-level class on drug and alcohol abuse.

As the first American Indian professor at the Brown School, Dr. Patterson has helped connect Indian students on campus, of whom there about 20, with their varying heritages. (Students belong to the Choctaw, Navajo and Seneca nations and a half-dozen others across the United States.) He invites them to his home to sit around a drum and teach one another Native songs.

One evening, eight students gathered in a downpour with Dr. Patterson outside the Brown building for a traditional spiritual cleansing ceremony. A student lighted some blades of sweet grass and gently waved the smoke on each student with an eagle feather. The smoke rose into the dripping trees as a student led the prayer: “We ask our creator to help us stay on track,” he said, “and take this education, this training, kinship, all of this back home.”

Lindsay Belone, a Navajo from Twin Lakes, N.M., is working on her master’s degree with Dr. Patterson. “He’s brought to the classroom a lot of American Indian spirituality and social justice issues — honoring mother earth and our ancestors,” she said. “He’s definitely a leader in Indian country who I can look up to. If you want to be a professor, that can happen.”

Dr. Patterson will return to Buffalo this summer to participate in ceremonies among the Six Nations of the Iroquois and speak with students about Indian challenges. He also plans to visit other American Indian communities across the nation to share his story, much as he did last fall at Haskell, the only accredited university devoted to serving various Indian tribes.

Haskell’s history makes it as much shrine as school: a century ago, young Indians whose tribes’ land had been seized by the United States were sent there to become Christians, cut their hair and shed their traditional customs and tongues. Students who did not comply could be beaten or chained to walls in what is now Kiva Hall. Many died there from such abuse.

The Stolen Generations -- which is totally different from the oncoming Borrowed Generations of government-provided infant care and preschool and after school programs and that public boarding school in D.C. for poor kids.

Today, about 1,000 students use some of the same buildings to become one of the rare members of their tribes to earn a college degree. More inspiration came from Dr. Patterson, most poignantly when he explained why he took the name Silver Wolf. Wolves “take care of each other,” he said. “Their survival depends on it.”

Terry Redlightning, a Haskell junior from the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, recalled how only 17 of his 100 classmates at Flandreau Indian School graduated with him.

He described a “feeling of hopelessness” pervading his community back home and said Indians there live on whatever comes to them. “Whether that’s a government handout or a minimum-wage-paying job — or you commit suicide,” he said.

“Those are your options — at least that’s what the thinking is,” Mr. Redlightning said. “Especially when you’re a kid, you see it. You’re constantly going to funerals. Death by drugs or alcohol. Car wrecks. Suicide. You don’t have any high expectations.”

After his lectures last fall, Dr. Patterson walked around campus to visit relics of Haskell’s sad past — the powwow grounds, Kiva Hall and some sacred wetlands. Then he went to the most solemn area of all. It was a cemetery filled with dozens of small, weathered gravestones for children who, four and five generations ago, did not survive their days at Haskell.

Dr. Patterson teared up when he saw the stones from a distance. “These are the children of the Holocaust for us,” he said.

He dried his cheeks with a tissue and kept walking toward the cemetery. He looked up and saw a red-tailed hawk perched on a lamppost, leading him still.

This is not, of course, to diminish the tragic problems of genuine American Indians. But it does point out one source of the constant demand to import foreigners whose children and grandchildren are above average in likelihood to need expensive social services. Jason Richwine is being excoriated for suggesting that the American-born children of, say, foreign stoop laborers are, statistically, likely to be greater tax-consumers than taxpayers.

But, to a lot of people out there, that quite obvious prediction sounds less like a bug than a feature. More immigration of Latin American laborers will create more social work jobs for people like them. And, if they can gin up some tenuous claim to being Hispanic themselves, they can be not only social workers, but role models and leaders of their vibrant people, celebrated in the NYT, like Dr. Patterson is celebrated for being 1/16th American Indian.

The Fresno Bee reports an epochal breakthrough in economic theory is taking place in the fields of the Central Valley of California. As everybody who took Econ 101 in college knows, the Law of Supply and Demand says that shortages and surpluses push wages toward market-clearing prices. Except that, as we all know from reading hundreds of newspaper stories rewritten from press releases issued by growers' PR guys, the Law of Supply and Demand doesn't apply in the case of farm labor. There, the only alternative to Crops Rotting in the Fields is for the government to let growers import more foreign peasants. (Also, it would help if the government would round up the workers for the growers when they try to run away -- see the Dred Scot decision of 1857 for some common sense on the necessity of a Fugitive Slave Worker Act.)

But, now, in what sounds like a Nobel-worthy innovation, it turns out the Law of Supply and Demand is actually working in the Central Valley the same way it works everywhere else:

Fears of a potential farm labor shortage have caused San Joaquin Valley growers to boost wages to as much as $10 an hour this year to attract and keep workers for the harvest season.

With the farm-labor pool already tight and crops ready to be picked, growers are scrambling to secure their supply of workers.

"It is getting very competitive out there and employers are having to offer incentives to find the labor they need," said Oscar Ramos, a grape farmer and Kingsburg-based farm-labor contractor. "And one of those incentives is higher wages."

Farmers and agriculture industry leaders say wages have risen $1 to a $1.50 an hour this year compared to last year, or as much as 12%. Among Valley farmers, hourly wages are hovering between $9 and $10 an hour, which is higher than California's minimum wage of $8.

Wages could go even higher. In September 2012, the average hourly earnings for San Joaquin Valley farmworkers rose to $12.09 during the peak of the harvest season.

For workers like Jose Aceves, the higher wage is a welcome relief. Aceves and a crew of about 20 workers harvested peaches for HMC Farms in the Selma area Friday morning.

"We really appreciate being paid more," Aceves said.

I'm starting to wonder if this isn't an Onion article, except I know the Onion would never touch this subject.

"Because we know how hard it is right now for some farms to find enough workers. There just aren't as many people as there used to be."

Experts say tighter border security, increased smuggling costs for immigrants and drug-related violence are contributing to fewer people coming to the United States from Mexico -- a longtime source of undocumented workers for Valley farmers.

Adding a new wrinkle to the shortage of workers is the fear of immigration sweeps. On Friday, agriculture officials, farmers and law enforcement came together to quell rumors that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials were rounding up people.

Manuel Cunha, president of the Fresno-based Nisei Farmers League, said he spoke to federal officials, who assured him that no raids are taking place. Cunha said the rumors couldn't have come at a worse time.

"We already have a labor shortage and this only exacerbates the problem," Cunha said. "People are staying home because they are afraid."

Wait a minute ... I keep reading about how the Obama Administration is deporting vast numbers of illegal aliens, but here it says they aren't doing any work place enforcement in the world's most famous site of employment of illegal immigrants. (If I wasn't a nice person, I might assume that the Obama Administration merely changed how they count deportations to reassure voters opposed to illegal immigration.) And I thought nobody was immigrating ever again from Mexico.

Farmers knew the shortage was going to get worse before it got better. After dealing with fewer workers last year, they were spurred to take quick action this season.

"What we are seeing is the concern farmers have that they may not get the workers they need, or that they lose them to someone else," said Barry Bedwell, president of the Fresno-based California Grape and Tree Fruit League. "And it is already happening."

Bedwell said he heard from a grape grower who lost workers to another farmer who was paying higher wages.

Fortunately, this ground-breaking experiment in economic theory won't have to proceed much further because the Gang of Eight's immigration bill is raising the number of farm labor guest workers. And we all know that America is greatly benefited by Mexican guest workers coming here and having lots of children. Only unscientific social scientists like Jason Richwine or Christopher Jencks would have any concerns about the intellectual acuity and economic productivity of descendants of stoop laborers.

The third member of the committee is the big surprise, and the big problem: Christopher Jencks, for decades a leading figure among liberals who did serious research on inequality—a contributor to the New York Review, the author of important books including Inequality: Who Gets Ahead?; The Homeless; and The Black White Test Score Gap. Christopher Jencks knows exactly what’s wrong with the studies purporting to link “race” with “IQ.”

Richwine concluded his dissertation, “From the perspective of Americans alive today, the low average IQ of Hispanics is effectively permanent.” Why would Christopher Jencks decide that that dissertation was worth a Harvard Ph.D.? I asked Jencks whether he would comment. He replied “Nope. But thanks for asking.”

No less than Rush Limbaugh has cited the approval of the dissertation by Christopher Jencks, “a renowned left-wing academic,” as proof that the young man is being railroaded.

Fortunately, like a lot of leftists (other than the handful who have actually studied the subject, such as Christopher Jencks), Weiner knows that while science has proven that we all have the same IQ, he also knows that people who don't know that have been scientifically proven to be of lower IQ:

The last word in this story goes a study published in 2012 the journal Psychological Science. “In an analysis of two large-scale, nationally representative United Kingdom data sets (N = 15,874),” the researchers wrote, “we found that lower general intelligence (g) in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood.”

May 10, 2013

As a Whig rationalist, the economist John Maynard Keynes was a tremendous fan of Newton. Keynes bought a large mass of Newton's papers, only to be shocked by what he found. Newton turned out to be a character out of a Jorge Luis Borges story, a proto-Umberto Eco hero.

The celebration of the 300th anniversary of Newton's birth on December 25, 1642 was postponed to July 1946, by which point Keynes was dead. So, the biographical sketch written by the economist was read by his brother, the surgeon Sir Geoffrey Keynes.

The influence of Keynes' essay on Neal Stephenson's monumental Baroque cycle of four huge historical novels is highly likely. Stephenson views these books as a tribute to his Puritan WASP cultural and genetic precursors.

It is with some diffidence that I try to speak to you in his own home of Newton as he was himself. I have long been a student of the records and had the intention to put my impressions into writing to be ready for Christmas Day 1942, the tercentenary of his birth. The war has deprived me both of leisure to treat adequately so great a theme and of opportunity to consult my library and my papers and to verify my impressions. So if the brief study which I shall lay before you today is more perfunctory than it should be, I hope you will excuse me.

... In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason.

I do not see him in this light. I do not think that any one who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he finally left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child bom with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.

Since Jennifer Rubin, who scribes the "Right Turn" column for the Washington Post, is so ardent for immigration in America, I've found a great new cause for her: demanding that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tear down the brand new Israeli border fence that is so effective at keeping out illegal immigrants from Africa:

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara visited the Great Wall of China on Thursday, allowing him to make the obvious comparison with Israel’s security fence, dubbed by leftists as the “Apartheid Wall.

Unlike the Chinese Great Wall, the “wall” in Israel extends less than 10 percent of the total length of the fortification, the rest of which is a fence. ...

He said the Great Wall inspired him as Israel built the security fence along the southern border with Egypt.

“There has not been an engineering feat in Israel this large since the days of Herod,” Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday on a tour of the newly completed 230-km. fence along the Sinai border.

Netanyahu, who was shepherded through the massive, NIS 1.6 billion project, said the model will now be duplicated on the Golan Heights border with Syria, and later on the country’s eastern frontier.

“I think that the success here tells us that we need to complete the work on the other borders, and in the future we will close all of Israel’s borders,” he said.
Deputy Chief of Staff Maj.-Gen. Yair Naveh said a similar barrier on the frontier with Syria was in the process of being built, and should be finished by the middle of the summer to “preempt the possibility of terrorist attacks against communities on the Golan Heights.”

Work on the five-meter-high southern fence began in November 2010, and Netanyahu – who is touting the project as one of the major achievements of his current tenure – has taken helicopter visits to various points along the border to gauge the pace of work being done since then.

On Wednesday, Naveh told Netanyahu, “Mission accomplished.”

Nevertheless, another 13 km. in mountainous terrain near Eilat still needs to be built. When that is completed in an estimated three months’ time, the long stretch of border from Kerem Shalom, where Sinai and Israel meet the Gaza Strip, to Taba, on the Red Sea, will be sealed.

Brig.-Gen. Eran Ofir, head of the project, told the prime minister that “just as the Iron Dome defends Israel’s skies, the fence is an iron wall defending Israel’s border.”

Netanyahu said the fence had two primary objectives. The first was to stop the flood of African migrants into the country, which he said would – had it not been stemmed – have posed a strategic threat to the country.

The prime minister said that at the height of efforts to infiltrate the border last January, some 2,300 people were making their way across the border each month. That number dropped to 36 in December.

Just as Israel succeeded in stemming the influx of migrants, he added, it will also succeed in sending those already here back to their lands of origin. There are an estimated 60,000 African migrants here, some 40,000 of them from Eritrea and Sudan, countries to which Israel is unable to deport them.

Netanyahu last month appointed former Mossad official Hagai Hadas to spearhead efforts to send the migrants back home. He did not, however, provide any details on how those efforts were proceeding, or which countries would be willing to take the migrants in.

The fence’s second objective, Netanyahu said, was to combat terrorist attacks originating from Sinai. ...

According to Defense Ministry numbers, the new fence was built with 45,000 tons of steel, and enough earth was moved during construction to fill 1.67 million trucks.

Some 100 contractors were involved in the project, employing more than 1,000 people who – at times – worked around the clock to finish ahead of deadline.

The Defense Ministry said the fence was attracting interest from other countries facing similar challenges from illegal infiltration, smuggling and terrorism. The barrier includes the 5-meter steel fence itself, as well as a more rudimentary barbed wire fence in front of it, a sand road for tracking, a patrol path, and communications infrastructure including information collection points, cameras and state-of-the art radar.

As I've been saying for years, there is much that Americans can learn from Israel.

So, Jennifer, when are you going to get busy on Israel's anti-immigrationism?

'We make a real contribution to protecting the country,' says commander of all-female spotter unit on Israel's fenced-off border with Egypt. Retired general claims women better suited for patient vigilance required of surveillance

Reuters

Breaking cover from a lookout point disguised as a dune, four soldiers storm into the open, ploughing through the sand with rifles aloft. Their battle cries are like seagull calls, and from under their helmets, ponytails flap.

Team Mor is a spotter unit on Israel's fenced-off border with Egypt, deployed at night to intercept would-be infiltrators from the lawless Sinai desert. Like dozens of others along the tense divide, it is all-female.

"We make a real contribution to protecting the country," team commander Lieutenant Mor Dafna said during training drills at Sayarim field intelligence headquarters, marching distance from the frontier.

Any trespass in the Sinai would outrage Egyptians, many of whom resent having signed a peace treaty with Israel that largely demilitarized the peninsula in 1979. That makes spotting Islamist terrorists or illegal African migrants well before they reach the razor-wire border fence a strategic priority for Israel.

While the Israeli conscript military's gender egalitarianism is well known, when it comes to keeping the peace with Egypt over the border, women are valued perhaps even more than their male counterparts.

"It is no accident that so many women are in field intelligence - with all due respect to the men, women bring a special capability," said Major Oshrat Bachar, the chief of operations for Sayarim.

She would not elaborate, but retired brigadier-general Ruth Yaron, a former chief Israeli military spokesperson, voiced her opinion that at draft age, women tended to be better suited for the patient vigilance required of surveillance.

"This is a role that multi-tasks between discipline, pro-activeness and long-term focus, attributes that are often less developed among 18- or 19-year-old male soldiers," Yaron said.

The numbers suggest Yaron and Bachar are not alone in their thinking. Women make up 55% of Israel's field intelligence corps, compared to just 33% of the armed forces overall.

Uniquely for Israel's combat units, which are 96% male, the field intelligence corps has an all-woman infantry surveillance company - around 70 troops, including Team Mor - whose members sign up for an extra year of service in addition to the compulsory two.

Thousands of female sentinels monitor Israel's frontier video-feeds around the clock from hi-tech bunkers. Outside Gaza, some of the screens feature crosshairs linked to heavy machine-guns, allowing the women to remote-fire at Palestinian raiders.

David Tzur, a former general who runs the Israel Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Centre, said the remote system, known as "Ro'ah-Yorah" or "Sees-Shoots", takes the feminine form in Hebrew in a nod to the gender of its operators.

"The girls were not happy with the original masculine naming," said Tzur.

... "Women remain the minority in our armed forces, because there is not the conscription that sees so many women joining up in Israel," he said.

But he added:

"In my experience, while men tend to be physically stronger, women often tend to be more systematic, thorough and have a greater attention to detail at that age, which is obviously better for intelligence collection and analysis."

Jason Richwine, the co-author of a controversial Heritage study that has invited an avalanche of blistering criticism, has resigned from Heritage, the first step in what will be an effort to contain the damage arising from the report.

Richwine’s dissertation and public comments have postulated that Hispanic people have lower IQs than white people.

His work product, however, has not been withdrawn. Still, it is noteworthy that the American Action Network (which backs the Senate’s Gang of Eight immigration-reform plan and roundly criticized the immigration study) has bought search ads on Google surrounding the Heritage study link. They are driving to a page of quotes from conservatives panning the immigration study.

Aside from effectively sidelining Heritage in the immigration fight, the incident raises questions about Heritage’s president.

Meanwhile, Charles Murray says:

Jason Richwine, guilty of crimethink, "resigns." The bashing from the right has been as mindless as from the left.

Massachusetts investigators have developed what they call "mounting evidence," bolstered by "forensic hits," that point to the possible involvement of both Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his younger brother Dzhokhar in a gruesome, unsolved triple homicide in 2011, law enforcement officials told ABC News.

The officials cautioned that until more definitive DNA testing is complete, it is still too early to consider bringing an indictment against the younger of the two brothers ...

In the wake of the Marathon bombings, Middlesex County began to probe a link between the elder Tsarnaev and Brendan Mess, one of the three men killed in the gruesome slaying on Sept. 11, 2011. Officials said Mess and two men were found in a Waltham residence with their throats slit and their bodies covered with marijuana. Tamerlan and Mess were once roommates and did boxing and martial arts training together. ...

The savage 2011 murders unfolded on a quiet dead-end street on a balmy night.

Mess and his friends, Erik Weissman, 31, and Raphael Teken, 37, had ordered dinner from Gerry's Italian Kitchen at 8:54 p.m., but when a delivery woman arrived twenty minutes later there was no answer at the door and no one answered a call to Weissman's cell phone, from which the order was placed.

The bodies were discovered the next day. Former Middlesex District Attorney Gerry Leone said at the time that the murders were "graphic." Other investigators called it perplexing.

Roughly seven pounds of marijuana was dumped on the bodies and $5,000 in cash was left behind. Neighbors said they did not hear any signs of trouble – even with open windows – and there was no forced entry. In a 2011 interview, Leone said investigators theorized there had been more than one person at the scene of the murders based on "many factors," but no suspects were identified.

The apparently ritual aspects of this triple murder, which occurred on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, especially the use of marijuana as some kind of cryptic symbol, reminds me of my April 27th theory that the Bomb/Bong Brothers might have found totally awesome Marco Polo's account of medieval legends of the hashish-smoking Order of the Assassins (a.k.a., Order of the Hashashin) who originated in a fortress in Iran near the Caucasus. Maybe this was some kind of Dan-Brown-for-Muslims type thing?

The Tsarnaevs might have gotten interested in the medieval "Order of the Assassins" from the hit 2007 videogame Assassin's Creed, and its sequels.Wikipedia describes the plot:

Assassin's Creed is a historical action-adventure open world stealth video game developed by Ubisoft Montreal for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Microsoft Windows. Most of the game takes place during the Third Crusade, with the plot revolving around a sect known as the Secret Order of Hashashin (Assassins).

The player is in reality playing as a modern-day man named Desmond Miles, who through the use of a machine named the "Animus", is allowed the viewing and controlling of the protagonist's genetic memories of his ancestors, in this case, Altaïr ibn-La'Ahad, a member of the Assassins.

Through this plot device, details emerge of a struggle between two factions, the Knights Templar and the Assassins, over an artifact known as a "Piece of Eden", an ancient artifact used to control minds. The game primarily takes place during the Third Crusade in the Holy Land in 1191. ...

You can imagine how the game creators in Montreal would think it's cool to fantasize about having a Muslim ancestor -- hey, that makes me diverse! -- while the Tsarnaevs might take it a whole different way, like, say, becoming Islamic Assassins and killing the New Crusaders (i.e., Jews) is the destiny written in our "genetic memories."

Anyway, this is all just idle speculation at this point, but the most obvious question remains unanswered and largely unasked: Why were these guys in our country?

As the crushing of Dr. Jason Richwine reminds us, a popular pastime in 21st Century America is to speak power to truth.

As I wrote recently:

I'm reminded of a famous quote from 1984:

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.

Orwell turned out to be wrong about secret policemen: over the course of the 20th Century, even they tended to get tired of killing and beating massive numbers of people. The KGB stopped shooting political prisoners or working them to death in the uranium mine, and instead just locked them up in psychiatric hospitals.

But Orwell's real subject, the one he knew best from introspection and socializing, was the intellectual mind (e.g., Eric Blair). And, for his kind, he hasn't been proven wrong yet about the metaphorical "intoxication of power, ... the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless."

Granted, vastly swelling the population of America with disposable diaper-dropping Mexicans in the name of protecting the environment sounds pretty prima facie stupid. But that's not the point. The point is to grab any available tool to hammer The Enemy: i.e., other white people whom you find disagreeable.

And that never gets old.

Theodore Dalrymple has famously noted:

“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better."

I try to be scrupulous about my taxes, both because it's the right thing to do and because powerful groups don't like me. A long time ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center started poking around in my taxes. The SPLC is so in bed with various branches of the feds that the suspicion that the IRS might act upon a little list from the SPLC of people the SPLC doesn't like isn't necessarily pure paranoia.

A few days ago, it was recommended to me that I accept Bitcoins. I replied: I've always figured that accepting Bitcoins as donations would just attract SPLC and then IRS attention, so I long ago decided I'm not going to touch them.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A co-author of a disputed Heritage Foundation report on a new immigration bill has resigned amid controversy over claims he made about immigrants having low IQs.

A spokesman for the conservative think tank confirms Jason Richwine's resignation without offering any details.

Richwine was one of two authors of a report released Monday that said immigration legislation pending in the Senate would cost $6.3 trillion over 50 years as immigrants consumed federal benefits without making up for it in taxes. The report quickly came under attack as critics from the left and right said it didn't account for economic benefits from immigration.

Attention focused on Richwine when his 2009 Ph.D. dissertation from Harvard University surfaced in which he asserted that immigrants have lower IQs than the "white native population."

Richwine's crime was not being wrong, but being right.

As anthropologists Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox said about Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, the psychology of the story suddenly goes all wrong at the very end. As you’ll recall, the two “weavers” contend that only intelligent people worthy of holding their jobs can see the new clothes. So, just because one little brat is saying “The emperor has no clothes,” the mob isn’t going to suddenly agree with the kid. They are instead going to get very angry at this obviously stupid child who, clearly, isn’t even worthy of holding his job of street urchin, unlike all of the respectable people who deserve their positions of authority, who are all smart enough to see that the Emperor is wearing a ... uh ... new, higher form of clothing.

And here's David Weisel's article in Slate about how I quoted Richwine on my blog, thus proving his guilt.

Senator Lindsey Graham of the Gang of Eight explains that Latin America is a "hell hole:"

“We have a Canadian border.... Why are we OK up there and not OK to the south?… Why is one a problem and the other is not? Because Canada is a place where people like to stay. They like Canada. We like Canada. We love to have them visit. They want to go home because it’s a nice place,” said Graham. “The people coming across the southern border live in hell holes. They don’t like that. They want to come here. Our problem is we can’t have everybody in the world who lives in a hell hole coming to America.”

Maybe Mark Zuckerberg could promote the Gang of Eight's bill by purchasing an hour of primetime on all the networks for Lindsey and him to go on TV live and talk about whatever springs to mind. It would be riveting.

James Thompson, a psychologist at University College London, makes an offer:

One of the pleasures of taking a break in France is that when you “French Google” (an enquiry after meaning, not a sexual position) the case of Jason Richwine, currently subject to a public hate session, you get a reassuring collection of articles on fine wines. But, away from la belle France, in the land of Coca Cola the name of Richwine is now up in the spotlight of the haters, being Watson’d (see James Watson, Nobel Laureate and UnPerson on this blog) for repeating out loud the well-known data on intelligence, scholastic achievement and employability which is normally published in discrete tables in obscure papers, where it will not frighten the horses.

Although our genetics we will always have with us, the code of our ancestry written in every cell of our bodies, the labels we attach to racial groups, generally accurately, vary from country to country. ...

I have had a look at what Jason Richwine has said, and his comments are in line with the current data. So here is the challenge: a bottle of fine French wine sent to the first person who can show that Hispanic/Latino American intelligence and scholastic ability is on the same level as European American intelligence and scholastic ability.

After lagging behind other Americans in education for generations, Latinos have significantly narrowed the gap, and last year they passed a milestone, with new Hispanic high school graduates more likely than their white counterparts to go directly to college, according to a new study.

In an era of rising high school completion and college attendance over all, Latinos have made larger gains than other groups, the Pew Research Center reported Thursday, in a study based on data collected by the Census Bureau. By several measures, young Latinos have achieved parity with blacks in educational attainment.

But serious disparities remain, with Hispanic students less likely than Asians, whites or blacks to attend four-year colleges or go to school full time.
As recently as 2000, fewer than half of Latinos enrolled in college within months of finishing high school. But in 2012, the figure was 69 percent, compared with 84 percent for Asians, 67 percent for whites and 63 percent for blacks.

Hmmmhmm ... What's different between 2000 and 2012?

“This is the maturation of a big second generation among Latinos — native born, and educated in American schools,” said Richard Fry, the lead author of the report. He noted survey results showing that Latinos were more likely than white students to say that a college degree is essential to get ahead in life. ... Among the major demographic groups, Latinos remain the likeliest to drop out of high school, but that rate dropped by half in just a dozen years.

What's different between 2006 and 2012?

Oh, yeah, there were a lot of jobs for dropouts in 2000 and 20006, but not in 2012.

Less than 3 out of 10 Latino high school seniors who took the SAT exams in 2012 are ready for college, the college board announced in a new report Monday.

Of the 272,633 Latino students who took the standardized test, only 23 percent met the SAT benchmark score of 1550 [on a 600 to 2400 scale, or an average of 517 on a 200 to 800 scale], which shows a "level of academic preparedness associated with a high likelihood of college success."

College board research suggests a 1550 score out of 2400 indicates a 65 percent likelihood of achieving a B- average or higher during the first year of college.

The 23 percent of Latinos ready for college is dramatically lower than the general population. Of the more than 1.6 million total high school seniors, the most ever, that took the SAT in 2012, 43 percent were deemed college ready based on their SAT scores.

Well, Hispanic SAT scores must be rising, right? We can look at Unsilenced Science's graphs based on College Board data. Here's the Math SAT over time (the kink in 1995 is the "recentering"). I'll display Math because language is less of an issue:

Not much is happening, other than that Asians (top yellow line) are leaving everybody else in their dust. Latinos are the flat brown line, second from blacks at the bottom. Unsilenced also graphed the the size of the gap between whites and Hispanics for all three SAT subtests. The Verbal gap is slightly bigger than the Math gap, but they are so close that the Math gap has occasionally been larger. This suggests that language issues are not the driving force in these gaps. In contrast, Asians have a huge advantage in Math, but not in Verbal.

The white-Hispanic Gap is kind of, sort of getting a tiny bit bigger, but, as with most things involving Hispanics in America, basically not too much is going on.

May 9, 2013

For some reason, the New York Times doesn't include the names of all eight individuals charged with stealing $45 million from New York automated teller machines in its top story, but does provide a link to the federal indictment. As a public service, here are the names of the eight:

We've got a guy with an American first name, Elvis Rodriguez, a guy with Arab given names, Emir Yasser Yeje, and a guy with a Chinese first name and a hyphenated Chinese-Spanish pair of surnames who is nicknamed "Chino El Abusador." The greatest philosopher of mulitculturalism's fondest wish has finally come true: We can all get along!

Generations of Exclusion is a book by two UCLA sociologists, Vila Ortiz and Edward E Telles, published in 2008. It originated in a fair-sized data set (1576 people) collected in 1965, which was rediscovered in 1992. The original respondents and their adult children were interviewed. It shows quite clearly that although second-generation Mexican-Americans averaged more education and higher SES than the first generation, presumably because they knew English, there was no further improvement in the third and fourth generations. The gap remained substantial: the fourth generation had a college completion rate of 6%, compared to a rate of 35% for whites of that same era.

Which is pretty much what you see in New Mexico too, except that here we’re often talking about the fifth, sixth, and seventh generation living in the US

I don’t see much sign that the story is greatly different in Central and South America. Mestizos – whose ancestry is part Amerindian and part European (usually Spanish), make up most of the population in those countries. Their PISA scores are low – lower than those of Hispanics in the US. Performance in science and technology is more important than test performance – but Latin America’s low performance is consistent with their low test scores. This showed up in my Zones of Thought map.

Isn’t there reason to believe that this is all going to change radically for the better in the near future, powered by the strongest force in the Universe, wishful thinking? Nope.

New Mexico has relatively few illegal immigrants because it has had so few jobs.

When New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (who is 3/4th Latino) was running for the Democratic nomination for President in 2007, Tim Russert gave Richardson a hard time about his state on Meet the Press:

MR. RUSSERT: But let’s go through the resume a little bit. First, there’s governor of New Mexico. As you well know, they rank states in a whole variety of categories from one being the best, 50th being the worst. This is New Mexico’s scorecard, and you are the governor. Percent of people living below the poverty line, you’re 48. Percent of children below, 48. Median family income, 47. People without health insurance, 49. Children without health insurance, 46. Teen high school dropouts, 47. Death rate due to firearms, 48. Violent crime rate, 46. You’re the very bottom of all those statistics of all 50 states, and you’re the governor for five years.

Ouch.

New Mexico's state motto ought to be "Thank God for Mississippi!"

Of course, when I was a kid, I never thought that would be California's motto.

For data from Generations of Exclusion on Hispanic educational attainment through five generations of assimilation within families, click here.

For data from Roth et al on test score gaps between whites and Hispanics, click here.

In other words, this meta-analysis considered overall 39 studies with a combined sample size (all ethnicities) of 5,696,519 (only age 14 and above). The overall white-Hispanic gap was 0.72 standard deviations or (expressed on an IQ scale) 10.8 IQ points. This is a larger gap than Linda Gottfredson's 1988 estimate of a 7.5 IQ point gap.

The 95% confidence interval (i.e., excluding the single lowest and highest findings out of 38) range from gaps of 0.60 to 0.88, so there isn't a lot of disparity. (The one outlying 0.40 finding was for occupants of particular jobs, and thus had severe restriction of range issues.)

Language familiarity is of course an issue. For example, East Asians tend to score much better on American tests in math subtests than in verbal subtests. While there is some evidence for this pattern among Hispanics in America, it is not at all as clear as among Asians.

Here some interesting subtests included in the overall meta-analysis:

Obviously, restriction of range is a problem with many of these. For example, the Graduate Record Exam test is taken by people who either have graduated from college or about to graduate from college and are considering an advanced degree. But the overall gap on the GRE is still 0.72 standard deviations.

If you are interested in the meta-methodology:

Literature Review: Data Sources

Articles on Black-White and Hispanic-White differences on tests of cognitive abilities were gathered from several sources including Psych-Lit of the American Psychological Association, Educational Resources Information Center (known as ERIC), Dissertation Abstracts Interna-tional, and Abstracted Business Information (known as ABI Inform). Reference lists and studies used by several narrative literature reviews and meta-analyses of related concepts were also examined (Dreger & Miller, 1968; Herrnstein & Murray, 1994; Jensen, 1980; Osborne & McGurk, 1982; Schmitt et al., 1996; Toquam, Corpe, & Dunnette, 1989). Attempts were made to overcome the “file drawer problem” by contact- ing test publishers and researchers active in the field. Letters were written to 6 major publishers of cognitive ability tests and 16 prominent researchers working in the area.

To be sure ...

As such, it does not suggest that there are not high scoring individuals in both groups.

Christopher Jencks, who approved Jason Richwine's Harvard Ph.D. thesis, "IQ and Immigration Policy," is an eminent left-of-center social scientist. Jencks wrote for the New York Review of Books a lengthy two part survey in 2001 of news books on immigration entitled "Who Should Get In?." Here's an excerpt:

Heaven’s Door, by George Borjas, is by far the best introduction I have seen to the economics of immigration. Born in Cuba, Borjas came to America as a child. (He is also my colleague at Harvard, so skeptics should feel free to discount my enthusiasm for his book.) In 1970, he reports, America’s foreign-born workers earned as much as natives. By 1998 male immigrants typically earned only 77 percent of what natives earned. That makes the wage gap between immigrants and natives three times as large as it was in 1910.10 Immigration from Mexico has had a central part in this change. Mexico’s share of the foreign-born population has risen from 8 percent in 1970 to 28 percent today. Mexican-born men in the United States earn less than half what non-Latino whites earn, so as Mexico’s share of the immigrant labor force grows, the economic gap between immigrants and natives inevitably widens.11 America now accepts more legal immigrants from Mexico than from all of Europe. If one adds illegal immigrants, Mexicans are more numerous than Asians. The Bush administration hopes to expand Mexico’s share even further. It has said that it wants to legalize many of the three to five million “undocumented” Mexicans currently in the United States, as well as increase the number of unskilled Mexicans admitted on a temporary basis.12

Only half the Mexicans living in America have attended secondary school, and only a third have graduated. Only one in eight claims to speak English very well.13 Italians and Poles had similar handicaps in 1910, but Americans are far better educated today than they were a century ago, so the gap between Mexicans and American-born workers is wider. In view of their educational and linguistic disadvantages, Mexican-born workers actually do surprisingly well. Roger Waldinger, a sociologist at UCLA, finds that most California employers prefer Mexicans to the American-born workers who apply for unskilled jobs, because they believe Mexicans are more reliable and disciplined than natives. But while having the right attitude is often enough to get an eight-dollar-an-hour job, it is seldom enough to get one for sixteen dollars an hour.14

Since 1970, immigration has increased the number of unskilled job applicants faster than the number of skilled job applicants. First-year economics predicts that increasing the relative number of unskilled workers will depress their wages, because employers will not need to raise wages to attract applicants for unskilled jobs. Nonetheless, those who favor an expansive immigration policy often deny that the increase in the number of unskilled job applicants depresses wages for unskilled work, arguing that unskilled immigrants take jobs that natives do not want. This is sometimes true. But we still have to ask why natives do not want these jobs. The reason is not that natives reject demeaning or dangerous work. Almost every job that immigrants do in Los Angeles or New York is done by natives in Detroit and Philadelphia. When natives turn down such jobs in New York or Los Angeles, the reason is that by local standards the wages are abysmal. Far from proving that immigrants have no impact on natives, the fact that American-born workers sometimes reject jobs that immigrants accept reinforces the claim that immigration has depressed wages for unskilled work.

The second part of Jencks' magisterial article is here. And Responses that appeared in the New York Review are here.

The left wing New York Review of Books just ran a terrific two part series on immigration by distinguished Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks called "Who Should Get In." It's striking, although it really shouldn't be surprising, that starting from nominally opposite ends of the political spectrum, he and I reach almost identical conclusions about what's in the best interests of American citizens. Jencks' last sentence is, "Fifty years from now our children could find that admitting millions of poor Latinos had not only created a sizable Latino underclass but—far worse— that it had made rich Americans more like rich Latin Americans."

WASHINGTON — The revelation that a co-author of a Heritage Foundation study critical of the Senate’s bipartisan immigration proposal had recently argued that Hispanic immigrants are less intelligent than white Americans touched off a furor on Wednesday, undercutting the conservative foundation’s attempt to become a major force in the immigration debate.

In a 2009 dissertation for a public-policy doctorate at Harvard University, Jason Richwine, the co-author, wrote that Hispanic immigrants generally had an I.Q. that was “substantially lower than that of the white native population” — and that the lower intelligence of immigrants should be considered when drafting immigration policy.

“Immigrants living in the U.S. today do not have the same level of cognitive ability as natives,” wrote Dr. Richwine, who is a senior policy analyst at Heritage. “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach I.Q. parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-I.Q. children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.” ...

In response, the New York Times counter-argued: "... [cough] ... [cricket chirp]." Oh, well, I guess it is difficult to argue against. But it's easy to point-and-sputter:

“Whether you agree or disagree with the Heritage study, what their co-author believes is downright insulting and shameful,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, a group that has mobilized support for the bill. “Heritage has really become an outlier. The rest of the country is having a 21st-century conversation about immigration reform, and Heritage is caught in 1800. I really think their entire credibility is in question.”

The disclosure of the dissertation written by Dr. Richwine, who could not be reached for comment, threatened to undermine Heritage’s push for influence even as the foundation distanced itself from Dr. Richwine’s outside writing.

- George Borjas is the leading immigration economist. His Harvard Kennedy school bio reads:

George J. Borjas is the Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy. He received his PhD in economics from Columbia. His teaching and research interests focus on the impact of government regulations on labor markets, with an emphasis on the economic impact of immigration. He is the author of Wage Policy in the Federal Bureaucracy; Friends or Strangers: The Impact of Immigrants on the U.S. Economy; Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy; and the textbook Labor Economics. He also edited Immigration and the Work Force; Issues in the Economics of Immigration; and Poverty, International Migration and Asylum.

Richard Zeckhauser is the Frank P. Ramsey Professor of Political Economy. Much of his conceptual research examines possibilities for democratic, decentralized allocation procedures. ... He has been elected as a fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Sciences and as a member of the Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Sciences). ... He serves as a Trustee for The Commonwealth School and as a member of NBER, the Russell Sage Roundtable in Behavioral Economics, the Academic Advisory Committee, American Enterprise Institute, and the OECD High Level Advisory Board on Large-Scale Catastrophes. ... He holds a BA (summa cum laude) and a PhD in economics from Harvard University.

In other words, these three guys are social science heavyweights. Jencks, for example, knows vastly more about IQ than everybody screaming at Richwine put together.

This is an example of how the Gang of Eight's amnesty bill is a trap for all but the most politically correct, for anybody with a sense of realism. When Dave Leonhardt of the New York Times, who is really a pretty good guy (he publicized the Hoxby-Avery study, for example), writes about "Hispanics, the New Italians," he's probably not being intentionally disingenuous, he's just being East Coast ignorant. From his bio:

Mr. Leonhardt studied applied mathematics at Yale. He is a third-generation native of New York.

What does a third-generation native of New York who studied applied math at Yale know from Mexican-Americans? Nothing.

On the other hand, if you are from L.A., like me, it's hard not to notice that there is, on average, an IQ gap and that it doesn't go away, and that has all sorts of implications for education, real estate, immigration, mortgages, and so forth and so on.

One of the goals the Democrats have in inviting in more illegal immigrants by amnestying the ones already here is to rub the noses of more white people in the facts of diversity, so that they have to choose between being Evil or being Complicit.

And nobody hates us Evil folks like the Complicit.

For data from Generations of Exclusion on Hispanic educational attainment through five generations of assimilation within families, click here.

For data from Roth et al on test score gaps between whites and Hispanics, click here.

Here's the Google Wallet FAQ. From it: "You will need to have (or sign up for) Google Wallet to send or receive money. If you have ever purchased anything on Google Play, then you most likely already have a Google Wallet. If you do not yet have a Google Wallet, don’t worry, the process is simple: go to wallet.google.com and follow the steps." You probably already have a Google ID and password, which Google Wallet uses, so signing up Wallet is pretty painless.

You can put money into your Google Wallet Balance from your bank account and send it with no service fee.

Google Wallet works from both a website and a smartphone app (Android and iPhone -- the Google Wallet app is currently available only in the U.S., but the Google Wallet website can be used in 160 countries).

Or, once you sign up with Google Wallet, you can simply send money via credit card, bank transfer, or Wallet Balance as an attachment from Google's free Gmail email service. Here'show to do it.

(Non-tax deductible.)

Fourth: if you have a Wells Fargo bank account, you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Wells Fargo SurePay. Just tell WF SurePay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). (Non-tax deductible.)

Fifth: if you have a Chase bank account (or, theoretically,other bank accounts), you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Chase QuickPay (FAQ). Just tell Chase QuickPay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address (steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). If Chase asks for the name on my account, it's Steven Sailer with an n at the end of Steven. (Non-tax deductible.)

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